Second Life – Page 301 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Viewer Release Pipeline 2013-34

2013/08/26 by Nalates Urriah

This is week 35, but the news is from last Friday. With the viewer release pipeline there is a slow down. Viewer code changes are kept small to reduce the complexity of debugging. That seems to create a number of possible release candidates. With lots of release candidates one either has to release a new … Read more

GPU Table & Performance

2013/08/26 by Nalates Urriah

The Lab rates video cards into 5 classes. They setup your default viewer graphics preferences based on those classes.

There is an update coming to the GPU Table, which is what the viewers use to figure out what class your video card is in and choose your initial settings. We should see it in one of the viewer release candidates this week or next.

The GPU Table has this information:

// Class Numbers:
0 – Defaults to low graphics settings.	No shaders on by default	Not supported
1 – Defaults to mid graphics settings.	Basic shaders on by default	Supported
2 – Defaults to high graphics settings.	Atmospherics on by default.	Supported
3 – Same as 2, but with lighting and shadows enabled.		Supported
4 – Same as 3, but with ambient occlusion enabled.		Supported
5 – Same as 4, but with shadows set to “Sun/Moon+Projectors.”		Supported

You can find a copy of the GPU Table in the viewer’s install folder. Its secret name is: gpu_table.txt. You can look up your model of video card to see how the Lab thinks it should be supported.

Second Life News 2013-34 #3

2013/08/26 by Nalates Urriah

The Third Party Viewer meeting was last Friday. I’m just getting around to watching the video of the meeting. There is a lot of interesting news. I’m going to put it up in several parts. I can better index it and my new enhanced search will produce better results for smaller articles.

The interesting stuff:

Interest Lists

Still no project viewer from the Interest List people. Oz Linden doesn’t know what is happening with the project other than it is being worked on. His belief is the Interest List viewer release will provide more optimizations. Otherwise there is nothing that significantly changes.

Second Life Height Offset

2013/08/24 by Nalates Urriah

Third party viewer users are accustomed to have the a feature know as avatar z-offset or height offset. This feature allowed us to precisely control our avatars vertical position. Whether walking, sitting, or ground sitting we could adjust the avatar’s vertical position in relation to the ground or a floor.

The roll out of SSA broke this feature. It appears this is the thing most often asked about in various support groups since SSA rolled out. At least it is the question I see most consistently being asked. Well, that and temporary texture upload. But, temporary texture upload has been replaced with Local Textures for some time.

Today I see the Marine Kelly has an article out about a fix for Height Offset. See: RestrainedLove Viewer 2.8.5.3 with Z offset fix. Marine also explains how to use Local textures in her article.

Kokua Viewer 3.6.3 Released

2013/08/23 by Nalates Urriah

WARNING! If you are a Windows user, avoid grabbing a copy and just installing it. That will create problems. Read the notice on the blog. Some things have changed and this install must be done differently than in the past. See: Kokua 3.6.3. Once you have made an update to 3.6.3 the installs will work correctly… or so we think.

The problem comes from the Kokua Dev Team incorporating Automatic Updates. The addition required a renaming of the install folder from Kokua Viewer to just Kokua. A basic install will result in having two versions of Kokua installed.

Second Life’s New Bake Fail

2013/08/262013/08/23 by Nalates Urriah

Update: 2013-08-26

The Sunshine Project has greatly reduced the number of bake fails users experience. The goal of SSA was to improve the reliability of avatar baking. That goal was met. Remember. It was never believed that the SSA project would solve all avatar baking problems. The process is dependent on many aspects of the viewer, your hardware, your connection to SL (which is NOT the same as your general Internet connection), the state of your inventory, the load on SL inventory systems, and much more.

There was never the possibility of getting all these systems to work perfectly 100% of the time. So, from time to time, we will see bake fail. Way fewer people see tenuous bake fail now.

Problems

The problem where some textures just don’t download also seems to affect the SSA bake. The SSA ovens bakes 3 textures; head, upper body, and lower body. I’ve seen a texture for my upper body refuse to download. The head and lower body rendered quickly. Five minutes later I still had a gray torso. Doing a clothing change solved the problem.

There are reports of people remaining grey even when using the newer viewers. Others usually see them normally. I suspect this happens because the user with the problem has a poor connection to Second Life™, which is very different from having a good general connection to the Internet.